come in peace, you
shall be welcome, and we will make a feast for you. We will hunt the
nimble deer with you, and show you where the mighty eagle roosts, and
where the fish with shining scales abides. If you come painted, your
war-pipe filled, your bow bent, your arrow sharp and barbed, your heart
strong, and your cry loud, we too will paint ourselves; we will smoke
our pipe of war, we will bend our bow, make sharp our arrows, and stout
our hearts, and will cry our war-cry, till the startled heron shall wing
his way from the swamps to his hiding-place among the hills, and the
deer shall escape from the open space to the tangled covert. Our shouts
shall be as loud as the roar of the Lake of Whales in the time of the
Herring-Moon.

"Brother, we have with us a chief, whose face is of the colour of the
plucked pigeon; he listens. He has crossed the great waters in the
season of storms, he has forded the shallow streams and swum the
deeper, and threaded the dreary woods, and faced unaccustomed dangers,
that he may learn our traditions, our customs, our laws, and our
opinions of the Great Spirit. He has come, if he does not lie, from a
far country, a land very beautiful to the eye, a land of many villages
and much people, but who are not so wise and warlike as we are. He has
left his father and mother, and wife and children, and the bones and
burial-place of his ancestors, to listen to the wisdom of the
Indians, and to be instructed by them in the history of their tribes.
Shall we enlighten him? Shall we teach him the things which we know,
that be may go back to his countrymen prepared to repeat to them the
words of wisdom which fell from our lips; that, when he returns to his
own fire-place, he may make the young doves coo, and the eyes of then
mother glisten, with the tales he has heard in the camp of the Red Man.

"Brother, the Narragansetts have a tradition which I will repeat before
you. It has come down to us from old days, and we believe it, for it was
told us by our fathers, who were men of truth. I know not how long since
the thing was done; I cannot number the rings upon the oak since the day
of its date, nor the moons that have been born and have died. But I know
it was done, and done in the lands which my tribe now occupy. Listen.

"The Narragansetts are the oldest people in the world; older than the
Pequods; older than the Iroquois. _When_ they were created, no one
knows, save the Great Spirit--_how,_ ask not